gegegeno

I first saw them in a kanji class when I was studying in Japan. The teacher made a lot of jokes to keep the class moving (otherwise imagine how boring just teaching kanji would be), so when he showed the second one I wondered if it wasn't just another joke until I looked them up afterwards. I decided to delve a little further into the meaning of the second one (嫐), and it seems that even though it's read as なぶる, it means not so much to tease or mock in a bad way but more like teasing flirtatiously. So much for balancing the gender scales I guess.

大阪弁ぺらぺらやなー！ 俺も大阪に住んだことあんオージーや。でもお前の3年よりかなり短くにただ一年間！阪大で勉強したんだ。 よろしくな！

(I really HATE double-posting, but...) Just as a follow up to what I was saying about Jay Rubin's translations taking a lot of license in the translation, I thought I might add that if you can find the books and stories translated by Alfred Birnbaum they are a lot closer in style to the way that Murakami writes in Japanese. It comes across as a bit messier than Rubin's translation, but if you wanted a more literal translation, or even wanted to have one that you could read in English with the Japanese version, then Birnbaum's translations might be a better fit for you.

I can read and write a little under 2000 kanji, and just read a few hundred more (not exactly sure how many). There gets to be this point in the journey of learning Japanese when its stops being so hard to learn new kanji and it's improving your grammar that becomes the most difficult thing. At some point you just get the hang of learning new characters, but so far I'm yet to get the hang of learning new grammar points...

This is exactly the advice I would give. Just make the decision to stop relying on romaji and use only kana and kanji. You're certainly not the only person to have this exact problem. As soon as you change that habit, your kana ability will quickly improve to the point that you won't have this problem, just because you're using it and not reverting to romaji. You're going to have to be able to read and write kana (and eventually kanji) if you want to go very far with Japanese, so the quicker you get that step over and done with, the quicker you'll be able to get on with really learning Japanese!

This isn't one that gets used all that often these days, but I quite like the kanji 嬲 nabu(ru), meaning to tease or mock somebody. It is literally a woman between two men. There's also a less common variant (it doesn't show up in Microsoft IME at least), 嫐 which is read the exact same way but makes it into a man between two women. I get the impression that it was invented to balance the scales in the "battle of the sexes"...

皆さんの親切な言葉にありがとうございました！ Thanks everyone for the kind words of welcome. I can tell this forum could use a couple more Japanese learners, and I'll try my best to contribute to those subforums in particular. It looks like there aren't too many Swedish learners either though, so maybe I should get a move on with my learning of that language so I can post there too!

The first time would have been when I learned Indonesian in about the 4th grade (yes, that young), though I can't remember a thing about the language. I moved schools and technically started learning Japanese a year later, but I tend not to count the 20 minutes/week of Japanese in primary school as studying the language when people ask me (Also, it makes my Japanese sound utterly terrible if I say I've been studying Japanese for that long. I tend to count from about when I picked it up in high school). I think that's actually pretty rare for Australian schools, but I happened to go to two of the (very few) primary schools that have language classes from that young. Most people here do a year of a language in 7th or 8th grade and that's it.

I think the acronym "LOL" has such a bad stigma these days that even if I actually do literally laugh out loud at something I read in a text, I still don't want to actually type LOL. I'm not even sure what the right thing is to do in that situation. I think I usually write something like "I just literally laughed out lout at that", which has the added bonus of making a joke out of it. I'm guessing their friend told them that they use the word too much and told them to cut it out. I've been there when a friend of mine called out another friend on how often they use LOL, ROFL, BRB and the like and it was something to that effect. Actually, I think they asked if the other friend (a guy in his twenties) was a 12-year-old girl on MSN, but close enough.

Australia's previous Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is somewhat famous for the selfies he would regularly post on social media, especially Twitter. It got to the point where some people were referring to him as the "selfie PM" and was even brought up (usually by his opponents) in parliamentary debates. It's a real shame that the word of the year wasn't announced sooner; he only left politics the other day!

One I find myself using maybe a little too regularly is "je ne sais quoi", which means "I don't know what" in French. In English you use it to describe that someone has a particular or distinctive quality that you can't quite put into words.

Oh I absolutely agree that you can't use any of these to learn conversation, which is a bit of a shame! So is it just the usual computer font now? Or still the weird calligraphic one? Ironically that one would have been closer to the way you handwrite the characters, but was too hard for me to make out the strokes. I'm really glad to hear you like it though. I might try out the Android version and see how I like it now.

I never really got into Memrise myself, if only because I already have a very effective routine with Anki, but it's good to hear that it works well for other people. Actually, one thing I really disliked was the font they use for Japanese. It was okay for kana but most of the time I found kanji to be almost impossible to read. But I know people who love the font too. I think I might have loved Memrise if it came out a few years earlier.

It was an interesting experience, that's for sure. I was lucky enough to have spent some time there before that (a few weeks in Tokyo for me too, and another few weeks travelling Tokyo to Kansai), so I was spared a lot of the culture shock. I studied at a big university in Osaka and lived on campus so the lifestyle was really easy. I worked hard in class and a lot of the time instead of directly studying in my spare time made a concerted effort to go and use it with Japanese friends in "real life". Apart from around the end of semesters when I had exams and reports due, I was pretty laid back. If anyone gets an opportunity to go on a student exchange, I couldn't recommend it enough, especially to Japan. I had so many opportunities to see and do things as an exchange student that I could never have done or even known about if I was just on holiday or working there. Some highlights were the overnight school trips to interesting destinations, traditional art workshops, a particular drunken afternoon spent in a dodgy down-town theater with one of the professors... I could really go on and on, but I think you get the point. It was an absolutely incredible experience, and one that I won't be forgetting anytime soon. If you ever get the opportunity to go on a cultural exchange or learn your language in that country, I highly recommend it.

Yep, that's what it takes really. Japanese kids write out kana and kanji heaps of times to learn them so it should be no surprise that it takes the same kind of thing for a foreign learner to learn them too. It's pretty boring, hard work but it pays off so much in the end when you can use them in real life! Also, Obenkyo is great for learning vocab and kana/kanji for those reasons. I like that it has a few different modes to make it easier and harder to get through the quizzes. I've found myself coming back to it a few times now.

Another Japanese one: Rooster (on-dori): kokke-kokkoh (a little different from English's "cock-a-doodle-doo"!) And the Japanese have long known the answer to a certain question... Fox (kitsune): kon kon

Oh man, those Nyu Zillunduhs! I have a tradie (tradesman) mate who was telling me about how he was going to help fix his boss's deck. He had no idea why I was crying with laughter. The funniest English word that comes to mind is "defenestrate" meaning "to throw out of a window".

I hardly use "lol" in English, but when I'm writing in Japanese on social media I find myself dropping a ｗｗｗｗ or 笑 (both mean "laughing") at the end of my message or comment. No idea why I can't stand writing it in English but write it a lot in Japanese...must be something wrong with me lol.

I think it can help sometimes to know the reasons behind some strange patterns in the language, why something is an exception to a rule, where certain idioms come from and so on, but I approach it in much the same way as the history of English. It's certainly interesting and can be helpful for your language ability, but knowing all about a language doesn't really convert into being good at that language. People who study linguistics might have a different view on it though. It's certainly not a bad thing to look at, just not I focus on personally.

You listen to people talking near you on the bus to try and work out what language they're speaking... PS: @sulayman, I didn't even think that made me a language nerd until you pointed it out. I've read every language book in my Amazon recommendations!

Hi all, Not my first post (woops), but I'm an Australian who's been learning Japanese for more years than I can count and just starting on Swedish. I speak Japanese quite fluently, and spent a year studying the language in a Japanese university. I read newspapers and light novels in Japanese and am working my way up to more difficult books. My writing ability is reasonable too, but I don't write much in English to begin with, let alone in Japanese! My goal with it is to become an interpreter, so I'm still working to improve my ability all the time. During the aforementioned year in Japan I met my girlfriend, a Swedish-speaking Finn. All her friends and family speak Swedish natively (and I have a couple of friends in Sweden too), so I'd like to learn a bit of Swedish so I can communicate with them more easily. Anyway, nice to meet you all. See you around! どうぞよりしくお願いいたします。 Tack!

Hi, as in the title I'm wondering where is a good place to start with learning Swedish? I'm planning to travel there and to the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, but my main goal is to be able to better communicate with my SO's Swedish-speaking family. So I guess my main goal is to be able to speak Swedish pretty well. Reading and writing aren't really a priority. Can anyone recommend a good audio course or even a textbook or other written material that focusses on Swedish as it's spoken?

Has anyone else here tried reading him in Japanese? I'm yet to start on one of his novels, but I've read a few of his short stories (One was パン屋再襲撃 [The Second Bakery Attack], I can't remember the title of the other ones) and apart from getting the hang of his style they should be readable (if a little challenging) for an upper intermediate. Incidentally, if you compare the original to Jay Rubin's translations, you can see that he takes a lot of license with it...you might be surprised to find that Murakami's actual style is a little different to how he comes across in English.

Ever tried reading a passage longer than about a sentence that has no kanji in it? It's awfully difficult to read. I don't know that you'd call it a "purpose", but almost every kanji has its own meaning. So reading a word in kanji, say even the word 漢字 (kanji) itself can tell you its meaning - in this case it's "China-characters". This also helps to separate homophones (words that sound the same) since, unlike in English, there aren't two possible "spellings" using hiragana and katakana in most cases. So unlike "there", "their" and "they're" in English, the only way to spell the other words also read "kanji" like 感じ [feeling] or 幹事 [organizer] is かんじ, so unless the context is really clear you can see how even a native speaker might take a while to work out which word its meant to be. Don't be too discouraged though - kanji can be easy to learn once you get into a rhythm. To put it in perspective, I've learned about 1000 of them in the last year.